Historic! Scientists detect first light from behind a black hole
In a historic finding that also attests to Einstein’s theory, astrophysicists have detected light reflecting from behind a black hole.
Astrophysicists from Stanford University recently noticed flashes seemingly reflecting from behind a supermassive black hole which lies at the centre of a galaxy which is 800 million light-years away from Earth.
Astrophysicist Dan Wilkins described the findings in an article titled “Light bending and X-ray echoes from behind a supermassive black hole”, published in the Nature journal. As explained by Wilkins, “Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything that’s behind the black hole. The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself.”
As per the abstract, “The innermost regions of accretion disks around black holes are strongly irradiated by X-rays that are emitted from a highly variable, compact corona, in the immediate vicinity of the black hole.”
As per their analysis, these X-ray flares revealed “short flashes of photons consistent with the re-emergence of emission from behind the black hole.”
These photons originated from different parts of disk. He writes, “These are photons that reverberate off the far side of the disk, and are bent around the black hole and magnified by the strong gravitational field.”
The astrophysicist has also noted that the observation confirms “a key prediction of general relativity”, confirming what Albert Einstein had theorized more than a century ago.